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Hustle
The most important thing you can do when you get an unexpected career opportunity is hustle. Think about it this way. You get this tiny little opportunity, this tiny little yes. With your hustle, you get to grow it into something bigger. You get to work on it. It’s almost like getting an audition. You got that one audition. When you show up, you better show up prepared. You better show up with all your lines with everything because the window it’s cracked open and you’ve got a hustle on it. This happened to me about a year ago.
An organization asked me to come speak at a university in Nashville and they did what people do when they don’t want to pay you. They offered me exposure. That’s what everybody gives you, “Oh, we want to give you exposure.” My friend always says, “My bank doesn’t take checks of exposure. I’ve tried to pay my mortgage with exposure,” but I wanted to do it, and it sounded fun. It was just this tiny little opportunity.
I showed up and they said, “There’ll be 60 people there.” When I showed up, there were seven and it was in the Starbucks portion of a bookstore. Imagine for a second, a mic stand in a crowded Starbucks. The Starbucks was full, just not full of people to see me. Then a human you’ve never seen gets on a microphone and says, “What’s the deal with chasing a dream? What’s the deal with building a job you love?” Every head whipped up. It wasn’t in a sense of yay. It was in a sense of why, and they looked daggers at me, and they gathered their stuff up, maintaining eye contact. I knew while they were leaving and they didn’t leave the building, they just went as far out of earshot as they could.
They were pressed up against the back wall. It was like Moses, I’d cleared a swath of humans. I had a chance there. Do I hustle in that moment? Do I try my best for the seven than people there and act like there’s 7,000? In moments like that, when you get this opportunity, you have that choice because your ego will get loud. Your ego will tell you things like, “This moment’s beneath you or you’re better than this.” I was supposed to have been at a conference the week before speaking to 13,000 people with Malcolm Gladwell and it got canceled. You better believe in that moment, my ego came and said, “Hey, I’m not good at math. Is seven people less than 13,000? Let’s run those numbers,” but I chose to hustle and I tried my best for the seven people.
That night I got an email from a professor at that university that said, “I’d never heard of you before. Would you ever want to come speak to my college students?” The yes, that unexpected moment got a little bit bigger. I showed up and I spoke and it was again, a free event. I spoke to 60 students. Then after I tweeted about it, you should always tell people what you do. Bravery has two moments, doing something awesome, and then telling someone you did something awesome. Most artists, most business owners, most humans get stuck on that second part. There’s some amazing books that are sitting on laptops right now. There are some amazing businesses that go out of business because they don’t want to bother anybody. I tweeted about it and said, “Had a great time talking to this university,” and their football team saw it. The yes got a little bigger and they direct messaged me and said, “Hey, do you want to come speak to the football team?” I said, “Yes.”
That was intimidating because they’re monsters. They are massive humans. It was an SCC football team. I went and I did my best and it was Vanderbilt University. It was the last year that this Coach James Franklin was there. They just beat Tennessee and Florida and Georgia. That night he tweeted, “@JonAcuff is a beast.” There are a lot of words that have been applied to my life over the years. Beast is not one of them. Now, we’re in talks about me possibly coming up to Penn State to speak to that team where he’s the coach now. Will it happen? I don’t know, but I know it starts with something small like that.
Reach out to your relationships
When you go through a career bump, the most important thing you can do is reach out to your relationships. There’s some very smart things you can do. I mean, one simple thing is ask for help. I mean, your friends can’t help you unless they know you need help. We live in this culture right now where we all pretend to have it together. I mean, we live Instagram life. I don’t know if you ever feel that way, where all your friends have amazing lives on Instagram. Sometimes when we go through a bump moment, our first instinct is to pretend we have it all together. When you go through a bump, that’s when you need your relationships the most to say, “Hey, I need some help. I need some relationships in this moment. I need to be connected more in this moment.”
Often, we don’t understand how to reach out to people or we don’t understand who to reach out to. I would argue most of us don’t know who we really need to know. Even doing a simple exercise where you sat down and said, “Okay, today I’m going to take a stack of note cards and I’m going to write one person’s name on each note card that can help me with my job transition.” I just went through a bump. That could be people I’ve worked with in the past that I had a good relationship with. That can be people that own businesses, because they know other business owners. That can be friends that are casual, and you make it as large as possible. It’s not about who are my heart friends that I can cry on a shoulder with. It’s about who can help me in this career transition? Relationships are really important in that at moment. There’s the emotional part of it of saying, “Hey, I need help,” but there’s also the practical part of saying, “Who do I know that can help me, and how do I be deliberate about that?”